Huh, that’s still wildly confusing

Thanks for clearing that up.

At any rate, if you really want to know what the space sector is doing without paying for a subscription to Icarus or JGR Planets you can browse science sites like http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/
There are also some great blogs out there… like:
http://www.martianchronicles.wordpress.com

And if you like getting many sides of the story, there’s always:
http://www.nasawatch.com/
(The byline should be “a battle in every comment space”, but still… I always learn something.)

I would rather hear the author’s intent at this point.

Going to the moon? Everyone was glued to their screens, though it was basically just landing a little craft on a big, arid ball of dust.

Performing experiments on the ISS? No one cares, but often the results of the experiments have pracical applications for us down on Earth.

Now people keep pushing NASA to go to Mars, even though it’d be even more useless and would cost at least 10 times more than the lunar missions costed (the cost of Mars missions, manned and unmanned, will go down the longer we wait and the farther technology progresses, but Mars is still about 200 times farther from Earth than the Moon is).

Hmm….or every instance of something blowing up/ need for money is reported, while no instances of the others are reported. Now I just confused myself.

Pictures are proprietary to the proposal initiator for a year at most, then the data are public. They’re your tax dollars after all. In most pictures the colors aren’t real anyways…

Meanwhile defense spending accounts for 54% of the total federal budget. I guess we’re more concerned with fighting wars than scientific discovery these days.

Big Media only runs stories on NASA when they need money, and Space Disasters are newsworthy, regardless. But NASA does SO MANY COOL THINGS in a year…most people just never hear about them because Big Media would rather talk about Joe the Plumber or Dancing With The Stars.

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